Web-accessible E-mail services such as Yahoo! Mail, provided by Yahoo!, Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., have a large user base throughout the world. The majority of users access such services through a web browser, but there are millions of users who use mail-enabled applications employing the Post Office Protocol (“POP”) to access their E-mail accounts with such services. Such mail-enabled applications include, e.g., OUTLOOK and OUTLOOK EXPRESS published by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash. In addition, a large number of users spend a significant amount of time using mail-enabled applications when at work to access work-related E-mail. It is common for such users to use these mail-enabled applications all day for work purposes, and periodically check personal mail accounts in a browser window. In both cases, it is desirable to increase the accessibility of the web-accessible E-mail service to these users, while extending features of such services to the desktop.
One such feature is SPAM control for web-accessible E-mail users who use POP to retrieve E-mail. SPAM remains a huge problem and most web-accessible E-mail services do not provide adequate SPAM-control features, particularly to users who use the POP protocol to receive E-mail.
SPAM is one of the greatest challenges facing users of web-accessible mail services such as Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! Mail uses tools such as SpamGuard and SpamGuard Plus to detect incoming SPAM. These tools combine various functionality, including IP blocking, content analysis and filtering, and virus blocking. This has proven to be an effective solution for most Yahoo! users that use Yahoo! Mail through the web interface. Effectiveness (% of SPAM correctly caught) is estimated to be 95% for SpamGuard and 97% for SpamGuard Plus. SpamGuard Plus includes Bayesian filtering which allows users to train the system to predict what is SPAM given the user's preferences.
However, SpamGuard and related solutions are conventionally unavailable to users that use POP to retrieve their E-mail from their mail-enabled applications.
Mail-enabled applications that use POP to retrieve a user's E-mail from web-accessible mail services typically retrieve both “good” mail and messages that have been identified as SPAM by SPAM-filtering software operated by the mail service or other third party. Even though the SPAM messages may have been marked as SPAM by such software, there is no logic to route these messages to an appropriate folder on the user's computer. As a response, many users of web-accessible E-mail services have their settings set to not download their SPAM email. Thus, for the user to check for false-positives, i.e., messages that have been incorrectly identified as SPAM, the user typically must remember to access their account via a browser, rather than using POP, to review their Bulk folder. Few users will go to such lengths to check for false-positives, resulting in the non-delivery of some legitimate messages.
Another feature that leaves room for improvement is the built-in search functionality typically provided in mail-enabled applications such as OUTLOOK and OUTLOOK EXPRESS. Such search functionality provides a weak user experience in that it is relatively slow and inflexible. Google Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., recently launched a beta application called GOOGLE DESKTOP which indexes local files—including E-mail messages stored by OUTLOOK and OUTLOOK EXPRESS. A number of smaller companies have begun to offer powerful desktop search tools. Mail search remains one of the key features in these desktop search tools, but many mail-enabled applications do not allow the mail search features of desktop search tools to access the mail messages stored therein.